DOJ Wants To Drop Boeing's Criminal Charges

Originally published at: DOJ Wants To Drop Boeing's Criminal Charges - AVweb

DOJ says a Non-Prosecution Agreement is a better deal for victims’ families.

Between the devil and the deep blue sea. Say no and hope prosecution will prevail or accept what’s offered. Not a decision I’d like forced upon me.

Hmm. Nothing says justice like a cold, politically polished deal.

So more than 2/3 of families of victims opposed it. Not surprising. But there’s no really ‘good’ outcome for these poor families.

I think we’re all on the same page.

As already said, establishing a “fund” is much cheaper than having to pay cash direct.
Of course there is one other aspect.
Many governments work with laws with forbid them from giving business to convicted criminals, both individuals and criminal entities.
And many companies operate with similar rules – Ryanair is Irish and I would be surprised if its corporate governance regulations allows it to do business knowingly with criminals.
This way it all goes away…

With this deal, the share price will start its rebound. Ker-ching! Thanks, fellas!

In the next few years, will a number of current senior civil servants begin their Boeing careers as consultants to the board?

Help me get this straight: the execs who guided, management who executed (pun intended) and gov’t bureaucrats who complied with the MCAS affair - not to mention the airline execs who seem happy to place people with near zero airmanship skills in the front seats - are all walking around freely - an official endorsement to just carry on but the posturing with something as ridiculous as charging a virtual person (i.e. the company) with a criminal offense has also just been forgotten. The only thing I can see is another billion bux - much of which will land in lawyers’ pockets - will encourage the legal and insurance scam businesses to weigh down all of civil aviation with even more costs.

IMHO this is what happens when finance tries to run business instead of businessmen and entrepreneurs.

About time! The DOJ knows it cannot win this case if it goes to court. The charge of fraud for hiding the need for sim training on MCAS has no validity considering the system has no human interface, making training on it impossible. I suppose they realized that they’ve milked Boeing as a cash cow for long enough. Hasn’t Boeing already settled claims with all the crash victims’ families? Hopefully Boeing has learned from this long and expensive charade that it does best when it sticks to designing, manufacturing and servicing their products, not dabbling in politics. A week after the first crash it was very clear from the FDR data that there wasn’t anything wrong with the design of MCAS and that the pilots had responded reflexively and appropriately to the uncommanded pitch deviation, but they failed to execute the runaway stab procedure as necessary, perhaps were not trained on it. The latter was confirmed when the CVR was found 2 months later and revealed that the pilots of the penultimate flight received that training on the fly from a deadheading pilot and the pilots who crashed gave absolutely no hint that they had even heard of a runaway stab and were thumbing through manuals looking for a procedure that might be applicable. Rushing to modify MCAS when it wasn’t necessary was a stupid move.

Boeing had been bitten before for not abiding by the ICAO’s gag order while participating in an investigation, but in the face of the utter nonsense being published by the media about the MAX, MCAS, engineering and management at the time, keeping mum was a huge mistake. Instead of nodding in agreement with Trump’s decision to ground the airplane, they should have spoken up and explained their reason for not grounding the airplane. It would have irritated the ICAO and the airlines, although no one seemed bothered by the airlines making public statements and more egregiously, the U.S. NTSB’s Chairman making statements to Congress about the column-cutout feature that were not only false but he claimed it to be the cause of the accidents! Speaking up would also have made China and EASA look foolish and expose their grounding of the airplane as opportunistic. And it would have saved the world a lot of grief. But sympathizing with the FAA’s reluctance to butt heads with Trump and an ignorant but belligerent Congress, Boeing played along, not foreseeing that they would get tangled in a 20-month grounding charade.

Without Boeing to confirm their analyses or provide clarification, with notions of Pulitzer Prizes dancing in their heads and goaded by the need for sensationalism, news reporters and aviation bloggers abandoned all pretense of abiding by the journalist’s code of conduct and went wild. They undertook analysis of Boeing documents and emails, somehow convinced that their high school education was appropriate substitute for the advanced aero engineering education needed. Many pilots chimed in too, forgetting that a pilot is to an airplane as a taxicab driver is to a taxicab, and flight training teaches them how to operate the airplane, and in support of that, how some parts work. It does not teach them how every single thing works, nor how to design it or analyze its design, even though the public generally expects such.

The resulting nonsense the news media and bloggers published—having conjured it up on their own or sometimes assisted by ex-Boeing or -FAA engineers who had little to no familiarity with the pertinent details—was easily believed by the lay public, and Congress. Anything, even nonsense, that isn’t contradicted or isn’t incongruent with prior knowledge will be considered plausible by a gullible audience and in time will be accepted as factual and true . Thus Boeing’s silence was pivotal in enabling the stories to grow in leaps and bounds, every day bringing new allegations and faulty analyses to support the previously published fallacies. And so MCAS grew from a stall prevention system to an instability remedying system, to a NG feel-matching system, to a type rating change avoidance system, to a system to hide the need for training, with tremendous power and pitch authority, that usurped power from the pilots, whose design had a single point of failure defect that caused multiple simultaneous alarms and warnings that stunned the pilots, leaving them helplessly confused. The absurd narrative is shocking for how plausible yet false it is and how easily it was accepted as factual by the public—worldwide! The sad part was how easily the FDR data published in the preliminary reports could prove the narrative to be false, but most people—trusting the news media and aviation gurus—never bothered to check and simply regurgitated what they’d learned from the internet.

Perhaps most despicable were the pilots of American Airlines who gave the news media and documentarians numerous demos in simulators, purported to be reenactments of the flights that crashed. Upon activation of a runaway stabilizer, the pilot let go of the controls and let the airplane nose over into a steep dive, saying to the horrified news reporter, “that’s it, there was nothing they could do.” Their fraudulent demos didn’t match the FDR data at all, but no one cross-checked; no one expects 4-striped pilots of a major airline to have so little integrity and lie so blatantly. Some of those ultracrepidarian pilots went on to give false testimony to Congress too.

It is more than 6 years since this nonsense started, time for it to end. Boeing finally indicated that they would not plead guilty and the DOJ decided not to prosecute. But Kelly Ortberg needs to come clean with his employees. You can’t expect high employee morale while the employees—who don’t know any better than the lay public and are similarly misinformed by the internet—believe that their fellow workers were/are cutting corners and were responsible for the deaths of 346 people. Also, the families of the victims need to know the truth.

Nothing says injustice more than a trumped up charge and fines just because the public demands it, Congress expects it and they know the company would settle rather than go through the expense and waste of effort explaining complexities to people who can’t comprehend them.

Pete, this may not be comfortable to hear, but it looks less like injustice and more like long overdue accountability.

From everything I have read, and what has come out in investigations, Boeing took a 50-year-old airframe and made major changes. Larger engines. New placement. Changed handling. But instead of certifying a clean sheet design, they worked within the existing 737 type certificate. MCAS was introduced to mask the handling changes, and it was left out of manuals and training to avoid triggering full simulator requirements. That does not look like an honest mistake.

The two crashes followed almost the same pattern. A single sensor failure triggered MCAS. Pilots, unaware of the system, were forced to fight an automatic nose down input they did not expect or understand. Whether or not you blame pilot response, the design and disclosure issues start at Boeing.

Maybe not every headline got it right. Maybe some coverage was sensational. But the DOJ did not extract hundreds of millions in fines based on nothing. Boeing’s own emails and internal documents confirm they misled regulators. That is not speculation. That is on the record.

I have been a “If it ain’t Boeing I ain’t going’” fan for decades. But from where I sit, this does not look like a company being unfairly punished. It looks like one finally facing consequences.

Raf: Surprised by your response. It reinforced my suspicion: Everything you read… you swallowed, hook, line and sinker, without vetting it, i.e. without utilizing any of the many methods typically used to establish its validity; e.g. the author’s foundation in the subject, likewise for the sources quoted—if any, a second source, the logic, plausible conclusions, first-hand review of the documents from which interpretations or conclusions were drawn, logical fallacies or errors, etc. Of course, you have to actually know enough technical details about the airplane and its systems to detect the fallacies and discern what WASN’T wrong with the airplane. Without such, one is inclined to accept whatever is aired, indeed one has no choice in the matter other than remaining ignorant.

You should elaborate on exactly what was wrong with that “50-year old airframe.” Hopefully you are not confusing the age of an airframe as-built with the age of its blueprints, as others have. Soon after the NEO and MAX were announced, I saw an article on either CFM’s or Safran’s website, touting the huge improvements in the LEAP engine. The article began (paraphrasing from memory): ‘As early as 2003 it became obvious that the A320 and 737 airframes had plenty of life left in them, so we took the improvements we had been accumulating while waiting to see what the performance parameters of the next new airplane would look like and began designing the LEAP with those airframes in mind…’ That’s how the LEAP was service-ready so quickly after the NEO/MAX were announced; the Chinese version was ready even earlier. Boeing would have been really stupid business-wise, to go with a clean sheet design.

The changes made to the NG were both, typical of a derivative minor model: engines, some structure, some systems upgrade, and some unusual extras: new displays, digital pressurization controllers, fly by wire spoilers, Elevator Jam Landing Assist, aft tail cone reshaping, APU door, …quite expensive engineering-wise and cert-wise, which belies the allegations that the MAX was done hastily and on the cheap. The allegations were not founded on any inside knowledge about Boeing’s operations but from erroneous deduction and speculation based on the CEO’s public statement many years prior that they were considering a new airplane–which they took as gospel truth–and from Airbus’ announcement of the NEO, which came first and which they erroneously assumed was a shocking surprise that sent Boeing scrambling for a desperate recovery. Thus the surmise that the MAX was hastily-done, minimalistic, riddled with errors, and corners were cut to keep it on the cheap. Then again, there was little to nothing in the sensational saga spun by the media and aviation pundits that was factual. The allegations were drummed up to support allegations from the previous day or week, often citing Boeing’s internal emails and documents. Those documents didn’t support the allegations, but because a prejudiced mind is easily led astray, ambiguities or details that were incomprehensible to the reviewer were easily twisted into something that denigrated Boeing.

There was no “changed handling.” There would have been a small non-linearity in the stick pull force gradient when pitching to very high angles of attack, but as you pointed out, MCAS masked it. That was one of the glaring logical contradictions in the accusations that no one seemed to notice: MCAS masked the change in handling; Boeing failed to provide training for the change in handling. Not that either accusation is true.

MCAS doesn’t force the nose down, per se. It operated the stabilizer trim motor briefly to de-trim the elevator. Trimming adjusts the stabilizer so as to reduce the elevator force required to maintain a particular pitch, and de-trimming increases the elevator force needed

True, a single sensor failure triggered MCAS unnecessarily, but that is not the definition of a single-failure defect. In engineering, a single-failure defect is when a single failure causes–either directly or via cascading failures–an inexorable progression to catastrophic failure of the system or the mission, with no possibility of intervention by human or systemic means. A wing breaking off would be an example, or an uncontained engine failure that ruptures all four hydraulic lines used for flight control.

Pilots never expect or understand a runaway stabilizer, a condition every airplane with a power-driven stabilizer can experience, and on the 737 can be caused by a failure of any of a number of components, MCAS was just one of them. Pilots are unaware of which system is causing it, and they don’t need to know. Boeing deliberately doesn’t teach them, because pilots have a bad habit of trying to fix faults, even when they don’t know a damned thing about the system, thus delaying the execution of a time-critical procedure and jeopardizing the flight.

When pilots experience a sudden uncommanded pitch deviation, they don’t stop o wonder what may be causing it, but reflexively move the control column to counter it. Indeed it may be caused by wake turbulence, wind shear, a vertical gust, or internally by some system failure. When accompanied by excessive spinning of the manual trim wheel, that is a clear indication of a runaway stab trim. Then the pilots have to restore pitch to the extent possible using the elevator and manual electric trim (if the latter works), switch off the electric trim system and fly the remainder of the flight using manual trim. They apply the same procedure regardless of cause—if they’ve received the training, obviously, and without even knowing that MCAS exists. One crew did exactly that—and lived to tell about it.

Boeing’s documents didn’t confirm they misled regulators, though to the prejudiced or ignorant mind it may seem like they did. The email reminding the FAA that they had agreed to remove MCAS from the manuals clearly stated the reason: “because it is transparent to the pilots.” Perhaps you can draft out what the simulator training should look like, keeping in mind that there is no human interface with MCAS–that’s what transparent means. The only thing added to the FSB report for the 737 involving MCAS when it was ungrounded was a “demo” of MCAS with no further details given. No one learns to fly an airplane by watching a demo. There was, isn’t and never will be sim training on MCAS.

BTW, the DOJ’s indictment of Boeing in 2021 even quoted that reminder email as justification, except that they replaced the justification as quoted above with […]. No, they weren’t trying to extend the life of the typewriter ribbon by omitting those few words. Still think the DOJ hasn’t been extracting millions of dollars from Boeing for nothing?

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